Innovation in action

In part six of our Co-Creating the Future series, we explore how GE Digital has enabled the digital transformation of three leading industrial companies

In part five of our Co-Creating the Future series with GE Digital, we looked at GE Digital’s playbook for digital industrial transformation, designed to help companies start their own digital journey. But what does a successful digital transformation look like? Here, we investigate GE Digital’s Predix portfolio in action for some of the world’s leading industrial players.

Taking Schindler to the next level

Swiss company Schindler may not be a household name, but the 142-year old company is one of the world’s biggest elevator, escalator and moving walkway companies. Its products haul millions of people every day, and it’s now moving gigabytes of data.

Using GE Digital’s leading application development platform for the Industrial Internet, Predix, Schindler has connected over a million elevators, escalators and moving walkways to securely analyse its data and help the company take digital monitoring to a higher level.

The data flowing from Schindler’s connected elevators will help the company identify, analyse and resolve possible service issues before they happen. This predictive analysis helps reduce downtime, lower the chance of having to walk up a flight of stairs due to an out-of-service escalator or elevator, and even improve design.

Optimising Exelon forecasting

As one of America’s leading utility companies, with more than $33.5 billion in revenues and over 32 gigawatts of total generation, Exelon wanted to digitally transform its business. Having accumulated decades of data that it had previously been unable to leverage, the company needed to bring data, people and analytics together to help realise its digital strategy.

Exelon and GE Digital began working together on ways to achieve the company’s goals using Predix. One of these projects was finding a new and more accurate wind forecasting solution. Exelon and GE Digital took a co-innovation approach to finding a solution, analysing a year’s worth of historical data to create an industry-leading forecasting application.

The resulting application reduced under-forecasting in real time and also improved day-ahead forecasting accuracy by 9%. This has enabled outage planning so that maintenance can be scheduled when there’s little to no wind, meaning minimal revenue loss.

Cristal reduces risk and costs

Cristal, the world’s second-largest producer of titanium dioxide and a leading supplier of titanium chemicals, was faced with the need to meet changing government regulations and standards, and also calculate the risk associated with not doing so.

To meet these challenges, Cristal implemented GE Digital’s Predix Asset Performance Management (APM) solution. This helped Cristal engineers see that they needed to better understand plant risk levels, reduce unexpected failures on critical equipment, and implement an inspection plan that used criticality as its basis rather than time.

Predix APM has enabled Cristal to reduce the risk of equipment failures by an estimated £2.12m a year, work towards a 56% reduction in required inspections and save an estimated £3.31m in inspection costs over 10 years.

GE Digital works with over 1,000 Predix-powered industrial customers around the world. Read more of their customer stories here.

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